


A Brief History of Shared Nightmares

by trailingviolets



Category: The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: Drabbles, Dreams and Nightmares, F/M, Fate, Jewish Character, Misunderstandings, Pain, World War II, but love too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-21
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-02-22 00:29:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2487794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trailingviolets/pseuds/trailingviolets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A hypothetical question stolen from Death's Diary:</p><p>If the nightmares had a soul, what would they say?</p><p>Or, a series of moments between Max and Liesel, who are both at the mercy of nightmares.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

Liesel watched him slip out of sleep, heavy-limbed and disoriented.

One dream merging into another as The Jewish Fistfighter's eyes slowly brought the world into focus.

Withdrawing her hand from where it clutched at his greyscale shoulder, The Book Thief attempted a watery smile.

Its pity resonated off of the stone-dirt basement walls, bringing Max to alertness.

Silently they greeted each other in open-eyed appraisal, Max turning his body towards the girl, gently placing her hand in his as he woke.

It was bitterly cold the night before, but Max's hot grasp was no stranger to Liesel's, even in summer. Not since the time Papa walked in on Max's pleading, groveling, when she'd walked into her bedroom and seen him there.

 _Please, don't report me_ , no words yet to say her name, _Liesel_.

She had no one to tell, but she'd liked the curled husks of his palms, dry, grating on her own. Broken dirty fistfighter hands.

"Hi Max," she breathes.

"Hi Liesel." Kneeling on the floor next to the drop-can canopy, she feels him lower his arm with her hand attached, electric with unexpected contact.

"It's early," she comments tiredly.

"Sorry to wake you." His eyes shine in earnest, un-playful. It was the way of the world. He was always saying sorry to her, and Liesel was always feeling sorry for him.

"But I wasn't asleep, no sorry!" She nudges Max into a half grin, his free hand flying up to the bridge of his nose, covered self-consciously, defensively.

Liesel huffs an intrepid sigh that only the paint cans hear, before leaning closer into his shoulder.

Of all things, she knows what it is to be constantly afraid.

"So now I have you guarding me?" Understanding flickers from the mirth of Max's dark eyes. "You're waiting for my nightmares..." he says.

A foolish blush creeps up Liesel's neck, and she shoves him.

"Ja, it was only right after...after you gave me _The Standover Man_."

The taste of those new words in her collection is foreign, sweet.

"I didn't have anything else...but if you found some good in it..." he trails off again, embarrassed.

Max's anemic face is transformed by something infinitely human and warm. Liesel feels she could thaw if she looks long enough on his hopeful expression.

There is a breathless pause, as Liesel drew on her will to continue. She wishes to end it sweetly here, but there are things left to be said.

"Max?"

"Ja, Liesel?"

"Is it comfortable to sleep here?" she asks.

Worry betrays the lightness in her voice, compounded by Max's swift answer.

"I don't deserve it-I don't deserve anything your family has done for me." Perhaps too self-deprecating a sentence to be spoken aloud. (To be spoken to a young German girl sprawled on the floor, looking up with innocent, thoughtful eyes.)

Oblivious to any internal struggle, Liesel returns, "Max, you do deserve it."

She clutches his hand harder in hers, afraid to let him suffer alone. "So come on, is it?"

"You're really curious?" Liesel nods eagerly, twice for good measure.

***A Question from Death's Diary***

_How did the Book Thief end up in Max's bed?_

_The answer?_

_She was invited._

The mattress beneath Liesel is sharp and unyielding, and she knows instantly from the chill on one side that Max has very little space he feels comfortable occupying.

The Book Thief shifts restlessly in her oldest nightgown. All the same, she observes Max with a fragile tenderness.

Seeing him infinitely more at ease, wearing the sweater Mama taught her to knit. His dark eyes suited by high-rationed yarn stolen from scraps of outgrown brown cardigans.

After a measured-out pause Liesel exclaiming, "It really is terrible!" just for something to say.  Max fumbles for his smile and she immediately regrets such thoughtlessness.

"Not so terrible with company," he settles on at last, almost too quiet to hear.

She scoots closer, and feels his face bury itself in her unwashed hair, his arms curl to her sides. Rather than words, this is the right thing.

Max sighs, unfurling some of the tension-like wire in his body, shifting closer to her than the wall beside the bed.

He covers them with threadbare blankets and borrowed sleepiness.

"You're a Jew," Liesel hardly feels herself say the words. "I don't think I've ever said that aloud."

"Do you hate me for it?" Max is only half teasing, she realizes.

"Max, no-it's our country I hate. My mother, my  _real_ mother, she chose to be a Communist before she married my father, I think...but, Max-" Liesel loses her way.

"I didn't get to choose, I know, but maybe I would've?" The shock on her face almost comical.

"Why?" Again, she blurts her words without thinking too clearly, but Max only holds her, breath stilled by a moment of contemplation.

"Because nothing else defined me before I came here, Liesel."

"That's not true."

She'd heard Papa's sad-drunk stories of the baby Max on his mother's lap, watching inscrutably as Hans played Erik Vandenburg's accordion for her, one last time.

"You're somebody's son, the man Papa talked about from the war, and the music teacher-"

"Liesel?" He's never had anything to offer before. In Stuttgart, to the girls he dated, he was mostly a placeholder, a nuisance.

Somehow, he's found the first person, in the madness of the war, who offers _him_ something, and now he wants more than ever to match it in return.

"Liesel you're my-" Max searches in vain for a German word to equal _bashert_. Fate.

The irony of it doesn't escaping him, under the circumstances.

"Liesel, I don't regret. When you're here, I don't regret it at all." It's the best he can do without writing more words on the wall, without stretching out of the bed to shout it.

Closed-throated, Liesel settles at last on, "Thank you..." as a reciprocation to show she's heard.

"No-I should be the one thanking you...," he stops, knowing he's said the most he can. Anything else will just be untrue.

The desperation grows between them to smudge out the lines separating a Hitler Youth Communist and a German Jew.

Wanting finally to be lulled into false security, to fall asleep and not startle awake.

It is everybody's wish in 1942. 

Liesel brings Max's head to rest in the scoop of her neck with coaxing fingers, one leg tentatively resting over his as they try not to shiver.

Despite the cold, she decides then that this is a place where nightmares can't find her.


	2. Two

Hot coffee and Liesel, visiting the apartment at the top of the stairs while it's still too early for decaf.

Ellipses of false starts into sleep continued throughout the night, leaving Max scatter-limbed, dark under the eyes, finally lying at peace with shallow breath.

The Book Thief, all human tenderness and sweater-cable, smooths the feathers back from his chalky forehead as she enters the disordered bedroom.

Reluctant to wake the Jewish Fistfighter from throwing his imaginary punches.

"Hey," he whispers, leaning in to scrape another touch from Liesel's fingertips. "It helps me sleep, knowing you'll be my Standover Man."

Liesel's half-swallowed laugh morose, grateful. "How's our old friend, then?" Meaning, the _Fuhrer_.

"Remarkably alive." A hush grin passes back and forth between them, self-conscious of its own victory. "But not for long in the ring with me."

"And you, Max?" Worry seeps back into her voice like an unwelcome note of discord. 

"Remarkably alive." No mention of the crippling nightmares or the driving fear that he will wake one morning at the bottom of the hourglass. Fearing Liesel will be relegated to someone else's apartment, or worse, to a life of blackened-blue war hanging in the air like humid frost.

And him in the ground beside her brother, powerless. 

It's written on the faces of their parents, that death that lingers on and on. This is what torments him.

***

Max is normally tight-lipped in his introspection, excepting the nights they sit together at the edge of the small fire in her townhouse home.

Both mindful of the snapped-elbow gesture that first prostrated Max at the Book Thief's feet. That itching knowledge of each other's thoughts making it all the more impossible to stop an exchange of memories, however brief.

Just long enough to prove, the bomb-obliterated past is still,  _theoretically,_ real.

"Please?" he starts, Liesel not missing a beat with her capitulation, the unravelling of a new horror, or better, a new dream. "Tell me what you saw."

"Okay, so the basement was lit with all these Shabbat candles, right? And Max, you came to me from where we always sat on the third step, you were grey, but not shuffling, and you took my hand in yours as I wrote. The paint was so white, like fresh snow, and your hand unbearably warm. I tried to squirm, but you were grounding me into the dream."

Pausing for air and for the Riesling poured into Max's glass and down her throat in tense swigs, Liesel's voice is forthcoming.

"What did I write for you on the wall?"

"Max, I don't know-" Cutting Liesel off mid-phrase, the look she gets then.

Slow motion and entirely deliberate, his eyes flickering from her face to the fire.

"Liesel...?" He asks, in a tone that casts her reluctance as useless, old-world. 

"You wrote, the stars burned my eyes, over and over. But the words were...intact-I felt them on the stones of the basement wall, Max. Like being down there in January. I forgot you could taste mold...I forgot how you used to jump at the sound of feet moving in the kitchen."

"It was always just Rosa, that was stupid of me." He pretends to laugh at the sad-shaped memory of the woman. 

"Oh Max, the war wasn't just Rosa, and we all jumped."

She nudges him closer, letting a few minutes of comfort elapse before either speak.

"There's more, if you want." He gestures towards the half-drained wine bottle between them.

"We'll save it for tomorrow?" The Book Thief listens at his shoulder for murmurs of panic, elation. It's almost time for bed.

Anything to prolong the moments when they allow the past to speak, Liesel lingers.

Ending up enveloped in Max's same thoughtfulness, Liesel watches the flames dash each other to dust in the embers of the flue.

Hand in hand, the Jewish Fistfighter's earnest question for her, "These nights, are we working on remembering?" 

Marking damp lines down Liesel's face, tears in the same fashion as all others shed over their friendship. Suddenly they are staring at each other, and not the fire.

Max explains more of the Book Thief's life than even words seemed able, and moreover fills in the gaps leaking from Liesel's heart with his very existence.

She knows that she will love him like this until she dies. 

"We're working on not forgetting, Max," is her answer.

After a second's hesitation, they embrace, and kiss, and from then on the nightmares have no ground to stand on.


End file.
